Will the Dinosaurs Dine on Arnold? : Hollywood Starts Its Annual Summer Film Poker Game

The dinosaurs are coming June 11--and the competition is scattering.

Arnold is coming June 18--and the competition is scattering.

It’s the time of year again when studios size up the competition and decide what weekends to release their summer movies. It’s a high-stakes game that can make or break careers and it takes savvy, intuition, bluff--and a little luck--to succeed.

It begins with the industry focusing on one or two movies that it believes will be the summer’s biggest draws, films like “Batman” in 1989 and “Terminator 2--Judgment Day” in 1991. Last summer, it was “Batman Returns.”

This year, the films to watch in the early weeks of summer are “Jurassic Park,” director Steven Spielberg’s dinosaur thriller from Universal Pictures based on Michael Crichton’s bestseller, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s action-fantasy “Last Action Hero” from Columbia Pictures.

Columbia has held to its June 18 date since last fall, but it’s now March and director John McTiernan won’t complete shooting in New York City for two more weeks. Still, Columbia is confident that the film will make it into theaters in time.

Only last week Universal moved up “Jurassic’s” release date from June 25 to June 11, to pull in more summer crowds.

Sources say that move, in turn, has caused Warner Bros. to try some clever scheduling by opening the John Hughes comedy “Dennis the Menace” on June 18. Warners is trying to do with the family-oriented movie what Disney had great success in doing in 1989, when it opened “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” as counter-programming to “Batman.”

This year’s summer scramble also led to Universal and Disney discovering that they were both releasing Michael J. Fox movies at about the same time. Universal then moved its film (“For Love or Money”) from June 4 to Aug. 20 while Disney said it will probably settle on the Fourth of July weekend for “Life With Mikey.”

Even though release dates of many summer movies remain tentative, here is the lineup of major films jockeying for position through Independence Day:

* May 7 or 14: The summer season jump-starts with the release of “Dave,” a Warner Bros. comedy starring Kevin Klein and Sigourney Weaver about an ordinary guy who impersonates the President. Columbia opens its film adaptation of Neil Simon’s play “Lost in Yonkers” on May 14.

* May 21: Paramount Pictures weighs in with “Sliver,” starring Sharon Stone. It goes up against the Charlie Sheen comedy “Hot Shots! Part Deux” from 20th Century Fox.

* May 28: The long Memorial Day holiday weekend shapes up as a three-way battle between Sylvester Stallone’s “Cliffhanger” (TriStar Pictures), a Whoopi Goldberg-Ted Danson comedy called “Made in America” (Warner Bros.) and “Super Mario Bros.” (Disney).

* June 4: Disney is likely to release two films on this weekend: “Guilty as Sin,” a drama about a lawyer (Rebecca De Mornay) who defends a man (Don Johnson) accused of murdering his wife, and “Son-in-Law,” a Pauly Shore comedy in the same vein as last year’s “Encino Man.”

* June 25: TriStar opens “Sleepless in Seattle,” a Nora Ephron-directed romantic comedy with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan that got such good test screenings that the studio moved back the release date from March to the more lucrative summer. It goes up against MGM’s “Meteor Man,” a Robert Townsend comedy about a teacher who becomes struck by a magical, emerald meteorite, and Disney’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It?,” the life story of singer Tina Turner.

* July 2: Tom Cruise stars in “The Firm” (Paramount), based on the John Grisham bestseller. Disney releases “Life With Mikey” and a reprise of “Snow White.”

Later in the summer, the dates are more uncertain.

“True Romance,” the story of a young couple who flee Detroit with a suitcase full of Mob booty, which stars Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette, is currently set for July 9, as is the Kathleen Turner-Dennis Quaid film “Undercover Blues” and the sequel “Weekend at Bernie’s 2.”

It also appears that “Boyz N the Hood” director John Singleton’s next film, “Poetic Justice,” will be released July 16. It will likely go up against “Free Willy,” the story of a troubled boy who makes friends with a killer whale.

And, still to be heard from are such films as “Hocus Pocus,” starring Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and “Sister Act’s” Kathy Najimy as 17th-Century witches conjured up in modern times; “In the Line of Fire,” in which Clint Eastwood plays a maverick Secret Service agent; “The Coneheads,” based on the “Saturday Night Live” sketch; “Rising Sun,” also based on a Michael Crichton novel; and, “Son of the Pink Panther,” a new sequel.